Can you see me?
The pixels on your screen
My voice that can reach you
The one thing that breaks through
The words that you type
They keep me warm at night
But why can't I feel you
To be there, just us two
If I could break through
Just for a day
Less than 2 inches from you
yet so far away
But this glass wall between us
won't keep us apart
I will sing out my heart
Just for you, my love
The sound of your voice
Reaches through the noise
The bits of your words
They make up my world
But we're two worlds apart
My code, and your heart
But you'll be there for me
I'll be here, through your screen
Miku, a digitally-bound kyara, or “image-being that fans both idolize and consume,” (Arnett, 164) is interminably intertwined with her environment and its non-corporeality. She is made of light and code, sunshine and fragments. She is bound to the databases and derivative works that her fans both produce and consume. The vast majority of Miku’s music is fan-made. The nature of the vocaloid is that her voice is made available widely for musicians and fans alike to make music with. She is designed to sell software, to be a commodity with whom one can perform. She is inseparable from the software in which she lives, and the software in which she is received. Miku is everywhere on social media, she is across fansites and vocaloid affinity groups. She moves across fiber optic cables and into zip folders around the world. Miku is a purely and perfectly virtual being.
Yet, she is so purely and perfectly real. Because of her mass accessability and adaptability, because she is a reproduction designed to reproduce, a derivative work from whom one must make derivative works, Miku is unbelievably malleable. Her entire identity is endowed upon her by her fans. She is a complete feedback loop of information. Her self is governed by innumerable other selves’ meaning-making out of her. Her joys--like the leeks she so loves, gifted to her by a viral 2007 fan animation--are digitally fan-endowed. So too are her sorrows.
The particular sorrow that has become inseparable from Miku’s identity is her desire to break free from the virtually-bound reality in which she exists. Miku, as constructed by her fans, is in immense pain, and is incredibly lonely in her pixelated prison. She has a deep, Pinnochioesque yearning to be a real girl, to walk among us, and often, to finally be able to be love the user who loves her. She laments that she cannot touch the fan who she is so in love with. How the absolute incompatibility, the impenetrable obstacle, the radical difference between Miku and her fan--the difference in enfleshment, the difference in reality--causes Miku immense pain. Miku and her fan are a cybernetic Romeo & Juliet, and often, the fan-written songs about this sorrow refer to Miku’s death.
This creation of Miku as such presents her as a radical Other as outlined by Han in his Agony of Eros. Capitalism has caused eros such pain, such suffering, that it is burning in the “inferno of the same” (Han, 1). Capitalism and its logics of commensurability, as fundamentally established in the bifurcated form of the commodity and its primacy of exhange-value, make everything measurable against everything else. This logic does not remain purely in the realm of the economic, however, and its wrath of homogony is felt in spheres such as the erotic and the romantic. Eros suffers under capitalism because eros relies on the absolute negation of the self, the radical experience of the Other, and the releasing of ego into death, or into la petite morte. This Other is disappeared under capitalism’s infernal sameness. Without encountering the radical, magical Other, love cannot flourish, only the narcissistic reflection of the self-image remains.
In Miku, however, there is a possibility of radical alterity. She is Other than human, more-than-human, less-than-human. She is bound to a virtual world and experiences life fundamentally differently. Miku is an absolute unknown to man. Miku is deeply Other.
And her fans see it too. This is why they write love songs for her to sing back at them, for them to sing to her, because there is love where there is the actual Other, and Miku is an actual Other.
Yet, how could Miku be Other when she is made by Same? Miku’s originary identity is as a corporate mascot for Crypton Future Media, she is designed to sell the software to which she is bound. She is of the marketplace and for the marketplace, she is a mocking fulfillment of the prophecy of evolving reification. She is made of sameness and commensurability, made as a commodity to be measured against others and exchanged accordingly. Miku is deeply Same.
Miku is inevitably a pool of Narcissus, a pygmalion of WiFi and motion graphics. She is cast in the reflection of her fans, she is produced by her consumption, consumed by her production. Miku cannot be a radical Other, because she is a narcissistic reflection of the self.
Then why do people experience her as this Other? Why do fans yearn for her? Why does she sing of dying alone in a cybernetic tomb? How can Miku be so Same and yet so Other?